Utah Transit Authority Relies on Nexsan

Nexsan Corporation announced
that the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) has selected the Nexsan Assureon to
improve its object storage archive, assure regulatory compliance and seamlessly
support its disaster recovery strategy.

Using Assureon from Nexsan, UTA has reduced its backup window from five days to one while improving the performance, integrity and availability of its data, video archives,
and CAD drawing archives.

UTA operates a public transportation system throughout the
Wasatch Front of Utah.
Transportation includes fixed route buses, express buses, ski buses, three
light rail lines (TRAX), and a commuter rail line (FrontRunner) that travels
from Salt Lake City to Peasant View, north of Ogden. Its main operations are
based in Salt Lake City.

As with most public transportation agencies, a large volume
of the data UTA must protect comes from video surveillance of the stations and
vehicles it operates. Literally mountains of surveillance video can be captured
every day. This combined with heavy operational usage of unstructured data was
creating volumes of data that UTA needed to archive
to meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

Initially, UTA utilized the Assureon secure archive to
protect its archived email, scanned documents and departmental/user files
produced by UTA’s ~2,000 employees. Assureon provides protection of unstructured data compared to the traditional backup of the same
files over and over that UTA performed prior to Assureon. Now UTA protects
files from day one within Assureon where they are stored for
simplified recovery and assured protection. In addition, Assureon periodically
audits data for file integrity and availability throughout the life of the
stored data.

UTA turned to its trusted solution provider, Ramsys Computer
for a solution. "UTA’s data growth was having a tremendous impact on their
backup window," said Kirby
Park, President, Ramsys
Computer. "It was taking them five days to perform a full backup. They
needed to find a solution that could dramatically reduce the backup window
without requiring heavy time investments or complex management. That’s when we
recommended Nexsan Assureon. It would provide the ability to separate the
backup and archive streams for the enhanced performance and optimization needed
to support remote replication while scaling to multiple petabytes to meet
storage requirements."

Ramsys Computer used a replicated Nexsan Assureon system to
build a tiered storage solution. The replicated Assureon system was deployed at
two separate sites within nine miles of each other and connected with a fiber
optic IP network for disaster recovery. UTA also deployed multiple Nexsan
SASBeast storage systems with a combination of SAS and SATA drives

"I was impressed by the Nexsan Assureon solution
delivered by Ramsys," said John Jones, Desktop and Systems Supervisor,
UTA. "We found significant value in the features and were even more
surprised by the price. It was a fraction of that charged by other system
vendors. With Assureon we reduced our backup window and significantly improved
our overall storage efficiency. It has proven to be a very capable storage
archive, both simple and reliable. You just set it and forget it."

Part of the Nexsan Flexible Storage Platform of products,
Assureon is a secure online archive that is ideal for storage optimization,
regulatory and corporate compliance, and long-term archiving. For storage
optimization, Assureon offloads primary storage to free up space for active
data and thereby reduces the size, time and costs of monthly full backups by
completely eliminating the unstructured datasets from the backup stream. For
UTA, the existing backup environment was sufficient once Assureon moved the
unstructured data sets from the backup stream to the archive stream. For
regulatory and corporate compliance, Assureon complies with governmental
regulatory requirements including HIPPA, SOX and SEC-17 and simplifies the
enforcement of company data retention, privacy and protection policies.

"Organizations that rely on Assureon often see
immediate results in terms of storage optimization and performance," said
Victoria Grey, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Nexsan. "But often of even
greater value is the solution’s long term scalability, support for compliance
regulations and absolute data integrity. Assureon delivers multiple value
propositions for end-to-end data protection by providing archiving, disaster
recovery and replication in a single solution that seamlessly integrate into
UTA’s existing environment."